About Us

ABOUT US – DAINTREE RAINFOREST

About us – Daintree Rainforest welcomes you to the Daintree Rainforest website. Spectacular beauty and extraordinary biodiversity presented through a gallery of full-screen images by company photographer, Neil Hewett. The image gallery is partitioned into aerial, fauna, flora, forest, fungi, insect and spider lists. We hope you enjoy.

A new frontier of World Heritage Management

Come learn about us Daintree World Heritage inhabitants in this new frontier of living management. Inscribed onto the World Heritage List in December 1988, Australia’s successful nomination included an ambitious element of universal conservation, by crossing artificial boundaries to conserve rainforest of the highest biological significance, with a very small aspect of privately-held rainforest compulsorily included, without regard for tenure and existing land-use entitlements.

We, the Hewett Family, agree that the challenges of 25-years of World Heritage inhabitancy in the Daintree Rainforest have contributed to a unique perspective and lifestyle that aspires to the ideals of Australia’s indigenous cultures, enriched by a love of the rainforest and an ever-expanding grasp of information, sensations and experiences. Three generations reside in the heart of the most diverse rainforest in Australia and accept the life-changes that this single decision made, not just to our lives, but also on the importance of this decision to future generations. Surrounded by public facilities providing free rainforest access, we are obliged to develop ‘excellence and exclusivity’ that will attract altruistic travellers to support our conservation management requirements.

Our quest has taken us outside the boundaries of traditional learning, beyond the realms of conventional governance, and exposed us to an unlimited resource, the world’s oldest rainforest in its central and most bio-diverse Cooper Valley in the Daintree Rainforest. Liberated from contemporary disciplines, we have been free to explore our environment through personal observations, supplemented by electronic media, books and the generous assistance of Traditional Aboriginal people, specialists and visitors, all bearing a wealth of information and good will.

We present the genuine rainforest, including the people who are integral to the environment, as the apex species with responsibilities revealed through sustained inhabitancy. Our interpretation celebrates a quarter of a century of World Heritage protection and management of Daintree Rainforest and tens of thousands of years of Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal custodianship and kinship. We represent a return of humankind into the environment and a humble acknowledgement of our place within our Country.